Based on a little over a year of my observations, I predict there will be:

52 changes in total:
20 changes will make long-standing issues worse because Groundspeak doesn't have a single real geocacher working for them and they have no clue how geocachers actually think or use the site.
27 changes will make meaningful progress on long-standing issues.
5 changes will actually fix long-standing issues outright.
15 of those changes (including some of the good ones) will be reverted over the next few days with no explanation.

5 brand new (minor) features will be added:
3 of those features will be useless to actual geocachers, and implemented poorly and require fixes over the next few days
1 feature will be useful for real geocachers, but will be implemented poorly and take two months to actually behave as intended.
2 features will get in the way of real geocachers, and will be sidelined, castrated or removed within two weeks.

The horrible thing is that my company's software development works the same way. The people writing the code have no idea what it's for. This is no major problem, as long as they are given decent specifications to work from. Unfortunately, the people writing the specs are marketing people and have no idea what the users actually want or how they use the software. But they can think of new ideas all day long!

The horrible thing is that my company's software development works the same way. The people writing the code have no idea what it's for. This is no major problem, as long as they are given decent specifications to work from. Unfortunately, the people writing the specs are marketing people and have no idea what the users actually want or how they use the software. But they can think of new ideas all day long!

I am glad you caught yourself there at the end. While I agree that there are good and bad software developers, the average software developer should only be writing code to the requirement they are given.

Your first statement about no geocachers on staff probably has more merit than anything.

One thing to keep in mind, while developers should be testing their own code, they should not be held responsible if bad code goes into production. The morons running QA or whoever does final acceptance testing should be the ones that get flogged.

Unfortunately, I think John Q. Public is the unofficial QA team for Groundspeak.

It wouldn't be so bad being the unofficial QA team if we could tinker with things on a separate site until most of the issues were shaken out. I think they'd have a lot of volunteers, and they wouldn't annoy the core userbase by dumping half-baked changes on them.